The Poetry of Plant Names

In The English Garden magazine, recently, Helen Gunn wrote:

There is a general feeling, mostly unspoken, that English names are low brow and folksy. Latin implies education and expert knowledge, no matter if it also sounds affected.

She doesn’t deny that it is sometimes very useful to have a precise Latin name by which to identify a particular plant, but regrets the fading-away of more colourful traditional plant names like kiss-at-the-wicket, leopard’s bane, love-lies-bleeding, wake robin and Oswego tea.

There is such poetry in the English names that it seems an impoverishment of our literary heritage to lose them. I would rather think that I was growing sweet sultan than centaurea or bishop’s hat than the dreary epimedium. We could even reinstate some really old names, and refer to gladioli as corn flags and nasturtiums as lark’s heels.

Around here, that tall white-flowering plant is called snakeroot but we are quite able to identify it as cimicifuga if forced to do so. Oh, but didn’t I read somewhere that the garden gurus have started changing the Latin names around? So now cimicifuga is supposed to be called by another name entirely… Oh well, it’s still snakeroot to me!